Smart contracts are promising tools for governing DAOs but they alone aren't enough. In this artifact, we describe how written constitutions are an interface for a community’s shared values and must complement programmatic tools like smart contracts.
On forking the Web
This document contains a set of informal notes on how to build an alternative specification to the Web, in such a way that hopefully prevents many of its drawbacks while still preserves many of the good points. This document is not an specification, and is therefore subject to change over time.
Modular Politics: Toward a Governance Layer for Online Communities
Governance in online communities is an increasingly high-stakes challenge, and yet many basic features of offline governance legacies--juries, political parties, term limits, and formal debates, to name a few--are not in the feature-sets of the software most community platforms use. Drawing on the paradigm of Institutional Analysis and Development, this paper proposes a strategy for addressing this lapse by specifying basic features of a generalizable paradigm for online governance called Modular Politics. Whereas classical governance typologies tend to present a choice among wholesale ideologies, such as democracy or oligarchy, Modular Politics would enable platform operators and their users to build bottom-up governance processes from computational components that are modular and composable, highly versatile in their expressiveness, portable from one context to another, and interoperable across platforms. This kind of approach could implement pre-digital governance systems as well as accelerate innovation in uniquely digital techniques. As diverse communities share and connect their components and data, governance could occur through a ubiquitous network layer. To that end, this paper proposes the development of an open standard for networked governance.
did:web Method Specification
DIDs that target a distributed ledger face significant practical challenges in bootstrapping enough meaningful trusted data around identities to incentivize mass adoption. We propose a new DID method using a web domain's existing reputation.
Protocols for Publishers
A series bringing together publishers, developers, and researchers to explore open protocols for a sustainable agentic web.
ATProtocol Attestations: Cryptographic Signatures for the Decentralized Web - Nick's Blog
This post introduces the formal ATProtocol attestation specification, a framework for adding cryptographic signatures to ATProto records through two complementary patterns: inline attestations that embed signatures directly in records, and remote attestations that store proof in separate repository records. The specification prevents replay attacks through repository binding, uses CID-based content addressing for integrity, and provides the cryptographic foundation for verified credentials, trusted content, and authenticated interactions in the decentralized ATProtocol ecosystem.
DWeb
These principles define the values of a decentralized web based on enabling agency of all peoples. It is the basis for behavioral norms and mutual accountability.
DWeb
These principles define the values of a decentralized web based on enabling agency of all peoples. It is the basis for behavioral norms and mutual accountability.
Proposal: standard.site.declaration
Proposal: standard.site.declaration Draft for Discussion Abstract AT Protocol provides portable identity, portable content, and portable social graphs. What it currently lacks is a standard mechanism for discovering machine-readable declarations associated with digital content. Today, creators and organisations publish declarations about digital assets through websites, registries, the C2PA provenance framework, and other systems. These declarations may describe provenance, copyright ownership...
The Debate Over DWeb vs. Web3 & The Decentralized Elephant in the Room | FFDW
Comparing DWeb and Web3's approaches to decentralization, focusing on the key question: who designs, controls, and benefits from these technologies?
Between Principle and Pragmatism: Reflections on Prototyping Computational Media with Webstrates
Computational media describes a vision of software, which, in contrast to application-centric software, is (1) malleable, so users can modify existing functionality, (2) computable, so users can run custom code, (3) distributable, so users can open documents across different devices, and (4) shareable, so users can easily share and collaborate on documents. Over the last ten years, the Webstrates and Codestrates projects aimed at realizing this vision of computational media. Webstrates is a server application that synchronizes the DOM of websites. Codestrates builds on top of Webstrates and adds an authoring environment, which blurs the use and development of applications. Grounded in a chronology of the development of Webstrates and Codestrates, we present eight tensions that we needed to balance during their development. We use these tensions as an analytical lens in three case studies and a game challenge in which participants created games using Codestrates. We discuss the results of the game challenge based on these tensions and present key takeaways for six of them. Finally, we present six lessons learned from our endeavor to realize the vision of computational media, demonstrating the balancing act of weighing the vision against the pragmatics of implementing a working system.
Position Paper for the W3C Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents
This document represents the consensus opinion of the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software in the context of standards for Web Applications and Compound Documents.
Governing Digital Legal Systems: Insights on Artificial Intelligence and Rules as Code · MIT Computational Law Report
This article explores how AI and 'rules as code' are turning law into automated systems. It highlights the need for governance focused on transparency, explainability, and risk management to ensure these digital legal frameworks stay reliable and fair.
Composing capability security and conflict-free replicated data types — Spritely Institute
In August, I attended the DWeb Seminar where a small group of builders gathered to discuss the state-of-the-art and open problems in the distributed web space. Some in the group are primarily concerned with distributed data and focus on sync algorithms and local-first use cases. I am mainly concerned with distributed behavior and focus on the object capability security model. Both areas of study are steeped in their own lore and research papers, which makes it difficult for the two camps to communicate effectively with each other.
What if a PDS became more than a repository for posts? We propose using AT Protocol as a creator-controlled publication layer for declaration metadata describing digital works, making rights, provenance, and other trusted metadata independently verifiable and easier to discover.
From Personal Data Server to Personal Metadata Server
liccium.leaflet.pub